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European old-timers
In the IV-II millennia BC, when the first civilizations were born and flourished in Egypt and Mesopotamia, Europe was for them the same distant and unknown land as America was for Columbus's contemporaries. However, it could not even be called Europe: those whom we call Indo-Europeans have just begun to displace and assimilate the more ancient inhabitants of this huge peninsula. At the same time, in the east, some Indo-Europeans advanced to the Amur, where they surprised the ancestors of today's Chinese by the size of their noses and blond hair. And the Finno-Ugric tribes, moving from Asia in the opposite direction, occupied the entire north-east of Europe, possibly part of central Europe. It is believed that these ancient Finno-Ugrians brought with them the signs of the Mongoloid race.
So the two halves of Europe began to drift in opposite directions.
History, by and large, is that peoples learn from each other. Those who had to create everything from the very beginning can be counted almost on the fingers of one hand. These are the Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese, the creators of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in India, and finally, the American Indian civilizations. But for them, a reservation should be made: most likely, we simply do not know their predecessors.
By the time of Christmas, the chain of transmission of cultural heritage in the Mediterranean region of the Old World looked like this.
From the Egyptians and Sumerians - to the Babylonians, Phoenicians, Hittites, Cretans.
From them - to the Hellenes, Etruscans, Spanish Celts.
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From these latter, mainly from the Hellenes, to the Romans and the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, including the descendants of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians.
The circle is complete. Cultural primacy passed from the ancient Semitic civilizations to the peoples who spoke Indo-European languages. However, this centuries-old "educational process" fully affected only the areas directly adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea. The lands east of the Rhine and north of the Danube remained a barbarian periphery. Their inhabitants - both Indo-Europeans and even more distant Finno-Ugric peoples - were not affected by either Greek or Roman civilization.
Of course, archaeologists reasonably write about the progress that these barbarians made during the II-I millennia BC. The excavations confirm the improvement of technology and the far-reaching process of accumulating wealth at the top of local communities. For those who, in the historical process, pay attention mainly to the general (for example, to technologies or to class structures), and not to particularities (national, cultural, religious), this sounds convincing. If the achieved results are expressed in simple words, they boil down to the following: local leaders learned to accumulate treasures of gold and silver coins of Roman and Greek coinage, drink wine, use expensive weapons and jewelry.
And then the following happened: streams of new barbarians from the north and from the east poured into this barbarian periphery, significantly changing its established appearance.
Northern aliens
Earlier than others, the North Germanic tribes penetrated into eastern Europe. The name of the Germanic people - the Goths sounds today in the name of the island of Gotland and in the word "Gothic", denoting the architectural style of gloomy medieval castles. Goths moved from Scandinavia, which the inhabitants of continental Europe knew as "the island of Skandza". In the last five hundred years B. C. the climate in Scandinavia has become particularly harsh, and population growth seems to have far exceeded its economic capacity. After the Goths, the less powerful North Germanic tribes moved to the south. And this northern stream spread over the vast space between the Rhine in the west and the Danube in the south. War was an integral part of the way of life of the North German tribes. They were engaged in hunting, fishing and agriculture. Having depleted the soil in one place,moved in search of fertile virgin lands and hunting grounds to new ones, spreading across Europe to the west and east. By the 4th century A. D. all these wanderers went to the northern Black Sea region, to the lands that the Greeks and Romans called Scythia.
Scythia was a special cultural zone. On the one hand, it is the outskirts of the Mediterranean hearth of civilizations. In ancient Colchis, the mythical hero Jason sailed for the golden fleece, in the 7th-6th centuries BC. here the Hellenic colonies arose - Chersonesos and Panticapaeum (Kerch) in the Crimea, Olbia at the mouth of the Southern Bug and others. But at the same time Scythia remained the western end of the Great Steppe, stretching from the Ussuri to the Danube.
In the first centuries after R. Kh. In Scythia, nomadic tribes of Alans dominated, living by robbery and hunting. They had a completely European appearance, the IV century historian Ammianus Marcellinus calls them "beautiful". Having weakened neighboring tribes with frequent victories over them, Ammianus writes, the Alans "pulled them together under one generic name." In the neighborhood of the Alans, between the Dniester and the Dnieper, the Antes lived (most Russian historians attribute them to the Slavs).
So, the Goths came to Scythia, in the Black Sea region. They subdued all the surrounding tribes: the Germans who came with them, and local old-timers, including the Alans and Antes. Having won a victory everywhere, the Goths, according to the historian of the 6th century Jordan, "proclaimed the representatives of their nobility (thanks to whose fortune they turned out to be victors. - AA) not ordinary people, but demigods, that is, ansi." Scandinavian legends, written down centuries later, contain memories of the ancient land of these divine ancestors - the Anses, or Ases, located on the Tanais River (on the Don).
On the lands of the future southern Ukraine in the IV century, a Gothic kingdom was formed, headed by the king Ermanarich. His power, according to Jordan, extended far north, up to the Baltic. True, the word "power" can hardly be taken literally: the speech, apparently, was about occasionally received gifts, which the Goths regarded as a tribute. So Ermanarikh can be considered the predecessor of the Kiev prince Oleg the Prophet, who five centuries later collected tribute from the Novgorod slovens.
"Mobile states" - ships of the desert
By the beginning of our era, the western part of the Old World was already a single world, connected by numerous bonds of a political, economic and cultural nature. However, in addition to the Mediterranean, there were two more centers of civilizations located in the corners of the Eurasian continent: in the south - India with the adjoining Kushan kingdom, and in the southeast - China.
Almost all the space between the "corner civilizations" was occupied by mountains and deserts; nevertheless, already in the first centuries A. D. they were connected by the system of transcontinental transit trade. Overcoming incredible obstacles, repeatedly changing owners, goods slowly moved along caravan routes along the chain of oases that cut through the desert. As a result of such indirect contacts, each of the "corner civilizations" to some extent guessed about the existence of the other two. In the 3rd century A. D. The Chinese Kang Tai quotes a popular saying: "There are three types of abundance: the abundance of people in China, the abundance of precious things in Daqin (the Chinese name for the Roman Empire), and the abundance of horses in Yuezhi" (the Chinese called the Kushan Yuezhami).
In practice, the east and west of Eurasia were isolated from each other. There were no wars, no negotiations, no exchange of people, ideas or technologies between them. (Only India, with its intermediate position, had some kind of influence on the Mediterranean, and especially on China.)
In the 15th century, it took Columbus and his successors several years to lay sea routes between the Old and New Worlds. And it took centuries of efforts of many peoples to bring together the east and west of Eurasia.
The role of the ocean was played by the Great Steppe, which lies north of the "trading triangle", between the southern mountain ranges and the forest zone. Its inhabitants did not build cities, did not cultivate the land, but roamed along with their cattle. The constant migration from summer to winter pastures, the search for new ones and the struggle for them gave rise to a very special way of life. In the 19th century, the historian S. M. Soloviev wrote: “The steppe and the sea are two forms, equally opposite in their influences on history: how beneficial is the influence of the sea, which unites peoples, arouses their forces, constantly serves as a guide of civilization, so harmful is the influence of the steppe, which divides nations and constantly spews out predatory hordes, these scourges of God, who only know how to destroy, not create."
In fact, the role of nomadic peoples in world history is more complex. Of course, the history of unwritten peoples looks flawed. Information about them was recorded only in the chronicles of civilized neighbors - to the extent that they interested these neighbors.
Most of the nomads of the Great Steppe spoke the languages of the Ural-Altai group - Turkic, Mongolian, Tungus-Manchu. However, as a rule, we do not know what language each specific people spoke, and the names themselves - "Mongols", "Turks", "Manchus" - in those days, most likely, were not. There is no consensus among scholars about whether nomadic communities can be considered states. The historian Sima Qian, who wrote at the turn of the 2nd-1st centuries BC, called nomadic communities "xing go", that is, "a mobile state", a state of peoples "moving with cattle." If the steppe is considered an ocean, then "mobile states" can be called steppe ships.
Information about the structure of nomadic communities is rather vague. Nevertheless, it can be argued that most nomads lived in clans. The clan, including sons-in-law and dependent people, grew into a clan, tribes were made up of clans. The leaders of the strengthened clans or individual military leaders subjugated many tribes and clans. Unlike most European peoples, nomads' clan ties did not disintegrate over time, but, on the contrary, permeated the entire society.
The strongest clans and tribes were headed by khans (the original form was khaan, khan). This word, found in the Chinese chronicles and in the Turkic monuments, is associated in origin with the Turkic gon - blood and, in all likelihood, originally meant a tribal leader. Subsequently, the title khagan, or kagan, began to be used in the meaning of a powerful ruler, to whom many tribes are subordinate, and he himself is not subject to anyone. Khan began to designate the sovereign of local importance.
In Russian, the nomadic community is usually called the horde. In fact, the Turkic word “horde” meant the headquarters of the khan. The nomads themselves called their communities the Turkic word "el", the same as the Greek "polis" or the Roman "tsivitas", that is, the people together with the territory they occupied.
The elders of the nomads' society consisted of military leaders, elders, clergy and just the rich. Cattle and slaves were considered wealth, first of all (in the most successful "mobile states" the percentage of slaves reached up to a quarter of the total population). Here is what the Kyrgyz epic Manas says about wealth, which gives significant benefits:
“If you make cattle, it will multiply, And a man who has a lot of cattle will become a khan."
Hunnu, or Huns: a throw across the continent
For centuries, "mobile states" moved within the Central Asian steppe and along the borders of China, which served as the main target of their attacks. When in the 3rd century A. D. the great Chinese empire of Han collapsed and the country split into three large kingdoms, the possibilities for plunder became almost limitless. Either one or another nomadic associations “bit off” large chunks of Chinese territories, subjugating lands with a sedentary population and forming a kind of symbiosis with them.
However, in the II-III centuries, part of the nomads left their usual places and rushed to the west. Apparently, they were pushed to this by climatic changes, about which L. N. Gumilev wrote. In the middle of the II century, the path of the cyclones shifted into the forest zone, the steppe shifted to the north, and a desert advanced from the south. In the III century, the drought intensified, the amount of precipitation fell to 100-200 mm per year. It was no longer possible to feed in the same place, and some inhabitants of Central Asia again, like two thousand years ago, moved westward, crowding their neighbors and involving them in movement.
One of these peoples was the Hunnu, or Hunnu, who spoke a now extinct language. Once they created a strong tribal alliance and subjugated many neighboring peoples, but later they split and were themselves forced to submit to the Han empire. Most of the Xiongnu remained in their former places, some later even managed to gain a foothold in the Chinese territories, others moved west already at the beginning of the II century.
On the way, separate groups of the Xiongnu settled and gradually mixed with the surrounding population. The rest continued to move westward and after several decades reached the Urals, the Caspian and Trans-Volga steppes. Approximately in 155-158, these western Xiongnu reached the lower reaches of the Volga, in contact with the Alans, but they did not dare to go further to Europe.
What happened to them over the next two centuries is unknown. “One can only state,” writes LN Gumilev, “that over 200 years they have changed so much that they have become a new ethnos, which is commonly called the“Huns”.
The Huns enter the arena of Western history, armed with a new terrible weapon - heavy long-range bows. In the late 360s, they crossed the Volga and attacked the Alans. By the beginning of the next decade, mobile horse detachments of the Huns controlled the steppes of the North Caucasus from the Caspian Sea to the Azov Sea. The Huns included part of the defeated Alans into their horde. Over the next centuries, these Alans scattered over vast areas of the future Hungary, France, Spain and North Africa, mixing with the remnants of the Hunnic tribes, Germanic newcomers and the local population. Those Alans who did not submit to the Huns left for the Caucasus, where, together with other ethnic groups, they became the ancestors of the Ossetians.
For residents who lived in the south of present-day Ukraine and Russia, the catastrophe broke out in the winter of 377-378. The Huns marched through these lands with fire and sword. The author of the 5th century Eunapius wrote: “The defeated Scythians (as the Greeks and Romans indiscriminately called all the inhabitants of the Northern Black Sea region. - AA) were exterminated by the Huns, and most of them perished. Some were caught and beaten together with their wives and children, and there was no limit of cruelty when beating them …”.
The agricultural areas of the Crimea and the Dnieper region have turned into wild pastures. Ermanarich died, his kingdom disintegrated, and the new Gothic king Vinitar got involved in a war with the ants and in 376 crucified their king Bose (Bus) and 70 princes on the crosspieces. In "The Lay of Igor's Regiment", created eight hundred years later in those places where the center of the state of Ermanarich was located, when describing the misfortunes of the Russian (Kiev) land, there are the following words: sing the time of Busovo. " Many researchers see in this passage an echo of the memories of the victory of the Goth Vinitar over the Slav Bus.
Vinitar, who defeated the Antes, died in the same year, mortally wounded by an arrow in a battle with the Huns in the lower reaches of the Dnieper. After that, part of the Goths was included in the Hunnic army, while the other took refuge in Roman territory.
Huns in the center of Europe
The Huns came out on the approaches to the Roman Empire. As a matter of fact, the empire as a single power no longer existed. In the northern half of Italy, in the south of Gaul and Spain, the cultural influence of Rome prevailed. On the basis of a synthesis of Roman and local customs, a rather large Romanesque nation was formed here. And in the east, Greek culture dominated. Politically, however, the ties between Rome and Constantinople were not very strong. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the empire did not consider it a disintegration and continued, without exception, to call themselves Romans (Romans).
The presence of two emperors in one empire seems absurd, since we associate these terms with sole power. But let's not forget that the Roman Empire was considered a republic and its supreme rulers - not just emperors, but "Augusta" or "Caesars" - could not fully claim autocracy. For a long time in the empire, two "August" and two "Caesars", apart from numerous impostors, coexisted quite legally.
Sometimes the western and eastern rulers fought together against common enemies. Periodically, due to various circumstances, power over both parts of the empire was in the hands of one emperor. Therefore, the terms "Western Empire" and "Eastern Empire" (aka Byzantium) reflect rather today's retrospective assessment of the past situation: we know that the western part will soon disappear, and the eastern part is destined for a long life.
The Huns behaved differently in relation to the east and west of the empire. On the lands of Byzantium, they constantly raided. Hordes of horsemen with Mongolian appearance made a terrifying impression on Europeans. Ammianus Marcellinus wrote: “All of them are distinguished by dense and strong limbs, thick heads and in general such a terrible and monstrous appearance that one can mistake them for two-legged animals … Their faces are beardless, similar to eunuchs … They are so wild that they do not use any fire, no cooked food. The Eastern emperor was forced to pay the Huns annually, first 350 libres of gold, that is, about 115 kilograms (at today's prices - almost one and a half million dollars), and later twice as much.
History knows little about the personality of the Hunnic king Rugila, who led the first raids on Byzantium. Much more famous was his nephew and successor Attila. Being, according to Jordan, "a lover of war", he at the same time "was moderate in hand, firm and very strong in common sense, approachable to those who ask and merciful to those whom he once trusted."
The Hunnic leaders, nevertheless, did not strive to conquer anything, "Attila's thoughts," states Jordan, "were directed at the ruin of the world." After the campaigns Attila returned "to his camps." The Byzantine Claudius Claudian wrote with bitterness: "The captured cattle, taken away from their native cattle sheds, drink frozen water in the Caucasus and change the pastures of Argei for Scythian forests."
For a long time, the relations with Rome among the Huns were quite good-neighborly. The almighty Roman commander Flavius Aetius was friends with Rugila and Attila: to fight the rebels and Germanic tribes, the Huns supplied him with troops, and Aetius gave the Huns and their allies lands for settlements in Pannonia (at the junction of Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia) and Gaul (France) …
The situation changed in the late 440s, by which time Attila had established his power among the tribes that roamed in Scythia. The reason for interfering in the affairs of the West was given to him by the Roman princess Honoria, the sister of August Valentinian III. From childhood she was kept locked up, unsuccessfully forcing her to monastic life. To get out of captivity, she, already thirty years old, sends a letter to Attila, offering herself to be a bride, and as a sign of her engagement she puts a ring on the message. The groom immediately demanded from Valentinian Honoria's hand and half a kingdom as a dowry. August replied that his sister was married: the princess was urgently married to an ordinary person and was again put under lock and key. But this could no longer prevent invasions. At the beginning of 451, Attila, at the head of a half-million army, set out from Pannonia in order to get a bride and a dowry by force. Crossing the Rhinethe Huns and their allies flooded northeastern Gaul. Aetius with his army urgently left Italy and, crossing the Alps, moved towards the invaders.
The decisive battle between the armies of the Hunnic and Roman coalitions, known in history as the "Battle of the Nations", took place on June 15, 451 near Troyes, on the so-called Catalaunian fields - a huge plain that occupies a significant part of today's Champagne. On the side of the Romans, the Goths, Franks, Burgundians, Saxons, part of the Alans and Britons from Armorica (present-day Brittany) fought. “In this most famous battle of the most powerful tribes,” writes Jordan, “as they say, 165 thousand people fell on both sides, not counting 15 thousand Gepids and Franks. These, earlier than the enemies, came together in battle, clashed at night, intercepting each other in a battle - the Franks are on the side of the Romans, the Gepids are on the side of the Huns. " During the battle, none of the warring armies left the battlefield. However, after the battle, the Huns retreated beyond the Rhine, preferring to lose some of the booty in order to save the main forces.
The "Battle of the Nations" played a huge role in the fate of Western Europe: it freed it from submission to the nomads! The Huns ravaged Italy for some time, and then, due to the outbreak of the plague, they returned to Pannonia. Attila died, his sons fought with each other, the subordinate tribes went out of control. The state of the Huns split into several kingdoms, and they themselves dissolved among other peoples. However, the Europeans remembered their name for a long time and in subsequent centuries they called all immigrants from the East who had Mongoloid features as Huns.
The historical role of the Huns is very great (it is no coincidence that they were the first, whose deeds were reflected in both Chinese and European chronicles). The Huns were the first to tie the destinies of eastern and western Eurasia to some extent. But this connection turned out to be very fragile: even during their long journey to the west, the Huns began to disintegrate into groups that lost (in whole or in part) their connection with one another.
A. ALEXEEV
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